Grandeur of the Everyday

A lavishly illustrated overview of the life and work of realist painter Dale Kennington, featuring more than eighty-five of her most renowned works.

Grandeur of the Everyday is the first full-length volume dedicated to the life and work of Dale Kennington—an accomplished master of contemporary American realism. Kennington’s works often hold a strange familiarity, even for those coming to her work for the first time. Her paintings are at once familiar and yet defy specificity of place, clear and lucid while also dense in content. These effects derive from her unique ability to capture the essence of everyday living, the ordinary “in between” moments we often overlook in our day-to-day habits and transactions.

Kennington referred to her paintings as “merged memories.” Combining elements of photography, memory, and imagination, Kennington’s art is an entrancing blend of contemporary and magical realism, with themes ranging from loneliness to community and culture, from class and race relations to the juxtaposition of private and public life. Rather than study the spectacular, she concentrated on commonplace moments of human interaction, inviting observers of her paintings to ponder their significance and to complete their implicit narratives. Often relying on local subjects for her paintings—barbershops, bars, restaurants, gospel concerts, motel rooms, nursing homes—she presented a diversity of local experience.

Grandeur of the Everyday is a treasure trove of her most accomplished creations and includes more than eighty-five examples of both Kennington’s easel paintings on canvas and her freestanding wooden folding screens. The volume also offers an original interview with the artist conducted by Kristen Miller Zohn, an introduction by art historian Daniel White, and a critical essay by the director of the Wiregrass Museum of Art, Rebecca Brantley.

Cover

Half Title, Title Page, Copyright

Contents

Introduction

Dale Kennington is an artist whose work has stretched across
many decades of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She has a significant
amount of work in private collections and many notable public
collections of art throughout the Southeast. Kennington calls her paintings
“merged memories,” even likening them to myths. Her body of
work is Contemporary Realism, and has the human regard of Regionalism, ...

Common Rituals: The Paintings of Dale Kennington

Dale Kennington (born 1935) lives and works in Dothan, Alabama.
Her works vary from conventional easel paintings on canvas
to freestanding wooden screens. Kennington works in her studio on a
consistent schedule, painting from memory and photographic source
material. Beginning in the morning and ending well after midday, she
steps away from a work and leaves its unresolved passages for the next
morning and its promise of renewed clarity. ...

Artist Statement

I am an artist who begins each painting without knowing what it
will look like . . . where it will end. I usually begin with the background
and work my way forward. This sounds so simple . . . but it’s not. It
rarely works the first time or the second . . . or the third. I learn something
each time. ...

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